Secure remote file management with sshfs

It's a dangerous Internet out there, kids. If you are going to work on remotely connected machines, do it safely. Simple file transfers and interactive sessions have scp and ssh respectively; in fact there is hardly a commercial Web hosting provider left that doesn't support them. For more complicated scenarios we have VPN tools. But what if you need to work with files on a remote server, but find scp tedious in repetition and FreeS/WAN too cumbersome? You might find just what you're looking for in sshfs -- a tool for mounting a remote filesystem transparently and securely as if it were just another directory on your local machine.

Sshfs is one of the more straightforward FUSE filesystems, and thus a good place to begin for those new to FUSE. To get started, make sure that you have FUSE installed and working on your local machine. If your distribution is up-to-date, a binary package may be available to you already.